Early specification of CD8+ T lymphocyte fates during adaptive immunity revealed by single-cell gene-expression analyses
Open Access
- 2 March 2014
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Nature Immunology
- Vol. 15 (4), 365-372
- https://doi.org/10.1038/ni.2842
Abstract
How and when memory T cells emerge remains unresolved. Chang and colleagues use single-cell analyses to identify gene-expression signatures predictive of the eventual fates of individual CD8+ T cells during immune responses in vivo. T lymphocytes responding to microbial infection give rise to effector cells that mediate acute host defense and memory cells that provide long-lived immunity, but the fundamental question of when and how these cells arise remains unresolved. Here we combined single-cell gene-expression analyses with 'machine-learning' approaches to trace the transcriptional 'roadmap' of individual CD8+ T lymphocytes throughout the course of an immune response in vivo. Gene-expression signatures predictive of eventual fates could be discerned as early as the first T lymphocyte division and may have been influenced by asymmetric partitioning of the receptor for interleukin 2 (IL-2Rα) during mitosis. Our findings emphasize the importance of single-cell analyses in understanding fate determination and provide new insights into the specification of divergent lymphocyte fates early during an immune response to microbial infection.Keywords
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